# Constrained Convolutional Neural Networks for Weakly Supervised Segmentation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1506.03648 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.03648/

## Key facts

- Cited by 100 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 11 Jun 2015.

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 100)

- [Unsupervised Semantic Segmentation by Contrasting Object Mask Proposals](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.06191/) (2021)
- [Panoptic NeRF: 3D-to-2D Label Transfer for Panoptic Urban Scene Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.15224/) (2022)
- [Railroad is not a Train: Saliency as Pseudo-pixel Supervision for Weakly Supervised Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.08965/) (2021)
- [TS-CAM: Token Semantic Coupled Attention Map for Weakly Supervised Object Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14862/) (2021)
- [ReCo: Retrieve and Co-segment for Zero-shot Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.07045/) (2022)
- [Model-Based Domain Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.11436/) (2021)
- [Mixed supervision for surface-defect detection: from weakly to fully supervised learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.06064/) (2021)
- [DANNet: A One-Stage Domain Adaptation Network for Unsupervised Nighttime Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.10834/) (2021)
- [Leveraging Auxiliary Tasks with Affinity Learning for Weakly Supervised Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.11787/) (2021)
- [Cross Language Image Matching for Weakly Supervised Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.02668/) (2022)
- [Context Decoupling Augmentation for Weakly Supervised Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.01795/) (2021)
- [Scribble-Supervised LiDAR Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.08537/) (2022)
- [CycleMix: A Holistic Strategy for Medical Image Segmentation from Scribble Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.01475/) (2022)
- [Pseudo-mask Matters in Weakly-supervised Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.12995/) (2021)
- [ZeroWaste Dataset: Towards Deformable Object Segmentation in Cluttered Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.02740/) (2021)
- [Unveiling the Potential of Structure Preserving for Weakly Supervised Object Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.04523/) (2021)
- [Universal Weakly Supervised Segmentation by Pixel-to-Segment Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.00957/) (2021)
- [Adversarial Robustness with Semi-Infinite Constrained Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.15767/) (2021)
- [Incremental Learning in Semantic Segmentation from Image Labels](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.01882/) (2021)
- [Threshold Matters in WSSS: Manipulating the Activation for the Robust and Accurate Segmentation Model Against Thresholds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.16045/) (2022)
- [3D Spatial Recognition without Spatially Labeled 3D](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.06461/) (2021)
- [HardNet: Hard-Constrained Neural Networks with Universal Approximation Guarantees](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.10807/) (2024)
- [Uncertainty Estimation via Response Scaling for Pseudo-mask Noise Mitigation in Weakly-supervised Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.07431/) (2021)
- [Semantic Image Segmentation: Two Decades of Research](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.06378/) (2023)
- [F-CAM: Full Resolution Class Activation Maps via Guided Parametric Upscaling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.07069/) (2021)
- [Unsupervised Foreground Extraction via Deep Region Competition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.15497/) (2021)
- [Semantic Segmentation In-the-Wild Without Seeing Any Segmentation Examples](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.03185/) (2021)
- [CALDA: Improving Multi-Source Time Series Domain Adaptation with Contrastive Adversarial Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.14778/) (2021)
- [Image Data Augmentation Approaches: A Comprehensive Survey and Future directions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.02830/) (2023)
- [Adaptive Affinity Loss and Erroneous Pseudo-Label Refinement for Weakly Supervised Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.01344/) (2021)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We present an approach to learn a dense pixel-wise labeling from image-level tags. Each image-level tag imposes constraints on the output labeling of a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) classifier. We propose Constrained CNN (CCNN), a method which uses a novel loss function to optimize for any set of linear constraints on the output space (i.e. predicted label distribution) of a CNN. Our loss formulation is easy to optimize and can be incorporated directly into standard stochastic gradient descent optimization. The key idea is to phrase the training objective as a biconvex optimization for linear models, which we then relax to nonlinear deep networks. Extensive experiments demonstrate the generality of our new learning framework. The constrained loss yields state-of-the-art results on weakly supervised semantic image segmentation. We further demonstrate that adding slightly more supervision can greatly improve the performance of the learning algorithm.